A play about the depression and the precocious mid-live crises of the overeducated socialists and their bourgeois parents just will not work unless the play is funny. Especially if the said depressed socialists and their bourgeois parents are Russian. There is a reason why Chekov had the wherewithal to call his most depressing stage dramas comedies; he understood that spending two hours watching a bunch of self-absorbed rich people complaining about how they never work is an absurd situation, regardless of whether or not the fourth acts were legitimately tragic. However, the necessary combination of the comic, absurd, and the tragic is just not present in this production of Maxim Gorky
Curse of the Chattering Class
